Tightening the ring of steel won’t break the Palace of Westminster’s platinum-plated restoration budget • Cluttons pensioners were always destined for the lifeboat • Ten Battersea bridges to Pimlico are ten too far • Town and city parking subsidiary sniffs out green car discounts
The 22 March attack on parliament has elevated security concerns for the 15-year project to restore the Palace of Westminster. Detailed planning has begun on the two decamp sites due to open in 2023. Mildly heated discussions are taking place over how wide the ring of steel should lie around the purpose-built, but happily re-useable, Commons chamber, sited behind the Department of Health on Whitehall. There is talk of road closures around the QE11 Centre when peers take occupation. But fear not for the Deloitte-built, £3.9bn platinum-plated budget. The 1.2m sq ft scheme is budgeted at £3,250 per sq ft, more than half of which is padding. Here is a build-up: construction – £810m (£675 per sq ft); fees – £550m (£458 per sq ft). Decamp costs – £380m (£316 per sq ft). Total: just over £1.7bn. The remaining £2.1bn? That will be £740m for inflation, £800m for “risk” and £590m for VAT – which goes from Paul in parliament to Peter at the Treasury.
Always heading for the lifeboat
A distinguished former client of Cluttons last week bemoaned the fate of Britain’s oldest agent. On 5 May the firm, founded in 1765, dispatched 300 pension holders into the state-run Pension Protection Fund lifeboat and sailed away in a new corporate vessel, unfreighted by a £43m pension deficit. On 8 May the PPF said it would be “taking our normal steps to investigate the circumstances”. Said client suggested equity partners should have put more of their cut into cutting the deficit. Well, maybe. In 2008 Cluttons closed the defined benefit scheme at a cost of £3.4m, covered by an upward reappraisal of assets of £6.7m that reduced the deficit to £10.6m. Tick. But during the 24 lean months to March 2010 members were paid £9m, against distributable profits of £3m. Cross. But what clearly sunk Cluttons was a deficit that new boss Steven Morgan rightly called “unsupportable in the long term”. By 2013 the deficit had doubled to £21.4m. The deficit doubled again to £43m by the time the maroon went up.
